The EHealth program partnered with the Utah Department of Health (UDOH) starting in 2019. This partnership linked emergency department (ED) data with restricted data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS). The aims of this work were twofold: to improve our understanding of the social determinants of ED utilization in Utah and to evaluate if state-level ED encounter data could be used to augment or replace surveys for which the Census Bureau collects data (e.g., National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Center (NHAMCS)).

Overall, this unique data linkage demonstrated how existing administrative health records data could be enhanced with survey data, and vice versa. This innovation came from our ability to attach social determinants of health (SDOH) at the individual-level rather than aggregated to a geographic area as is typically done using public Census data. Findings from this work have been published in a Census Bureau working paper which you can access below.

These findings can inform efforts to reduce costs related to ED visits for non-emergent issues and improve our understanding of how the broader context of people’s lives impacts health outcomes. Additionally, our findings indicated that ED encounter data can be leveraged to reduce survey respondent burden, generate data collection cost savings, and create sub-national statistical estimates.